The project director for Mass Effect answers two looming questions about the …

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When Sony added a Blu-ray drive into the PS3, many people were slightly skeptical that it was needed for gaming. We're doing okay with DVDs, right? You can also put a game on multiple discs if you run into space issues. The question of the needed size for gaming media is one that will play out for a while yet, but Bioware's huge new title Mass Effect (coming on DVD to the 360) was able to pull off what many people thought impossible.

Does Mass Effect fit on one disc? Yep, but just barely. This is a monstrous game. In fact, there was a time–not too long ago–when we pretty much scoffed at the idea of fitting onto one disc. But, there’s an art to optimizing the data that goes on a disc–plus we have a few programmers that seem to pull off magic tricks right when we need them.

It sounds like they were scraping against the size constraints to fit it on one disc. I'm not sure what I think about this: I don't like having to pay more money for a Blu-ray drive if developers and publishers don't actually need it for the games, but I also don't want games to be cut down in order to fit on a single disc. I'd also rather not switch discs while playing a game, although that's a pretty minor annoyance.

Casey Hudson also talks about custom soundtracks:

Do you care if players use a custom sound track? This is actually a controversial subject, as most game developers don’t like the idea of people replacing their carefully crafted audio experience with random songs. But of course, players don’t have to use that feature, and I think most players don’t – especially in this type of game. And if the feature didn’t exist, you’d still be able to adjust your sound settings to mute the music and play your own music on a stereo. So we don’t mind supporting it. Having said that though, my last update was all about the huge original score that’s going into Mass Effect, so you won’t want to miss out on that part of the experience.

Neat! I'm always happy to have a choice when I play a game, but if the music is as good as they're saying, I wouldn't mind leaving my own soundtrack behind.